This invention relates to wireless communications systems and, more particularly, to wireless communications between wireless terminals and base stations in a multiple access communications system.
Multicast of traffic data involves sending the same message to more than one destination, e.g., to multiple wireless terminals. Multicast is an important function in wired networks. As wireless links are becoming part of integrated wireless and wired networks, efficient support of multicast in wireless systems is required.
In traditional wireless systems, each active wireless terminal, i.e., mobile unit, is given a dedicated control channel and a dedicated traffic channel on which the mobile and the base station exchange point-to-point control and traffic messages, respectively. A brute-force technique of realizing multicast is to transmit the traffic individually in the dedicated traffic channels of all intended wireless terminals. However, the same message is repeatedly transmitted a number of times over the air link, which wastes a significant amount of the wireless channel resource.
In some wireless systems, there is a common control channel in the downlink, which all the wireless terminals monitor. Thus, another technique of realizing multicast is to transmit the multicast message over the common control channel. Unfortunately, in general, the common control channel is designed to transport only system-related information and, therefore, it has only a relatively low data rate. Thus, transmitting multicast traffic data over the common control channel generally takes a very long time and doing so also introduces a long delay in transmitting other normal common control messages. Such long transmission intervals and long delays are extremely undesirable.
These and other problems and limitations of prior known wireless communications system are overcome by employing a common control channel to transmit a multicast paging message indicating that multicast traffic data is to be transmitted to a particular group of wireless terminals. In an embodiment of the invention, the essential information transmitted in the common control channel is the multicast group identifier of the group of wireless terminals intended to receive the multicast traffic data and the location of a traffic channel on which the multicast traffic is to be transported in a channel resource which may include a representation of bandwidth and time interval. In accordance with an aspect of the invention, the common control channel is associated with a traffic channel in a prescribed fixed manner. Further, the traffic channel used for the purpose of multicast can be the same traffic channel used for the normal point-to-point transmission of traffic data. In an embodiment of the invention, the common control channel is the assignment channel used in channel resource allocation for both multicast and point-to-point traffic, and is associated, in a prescribed fixed manner, to the traffic channel also used for both multicast and point-to-point traffic.